I am Breathing - Dublin Live art Festival 25th Sept 2014

Live  - performance as part of Dublin Live Art Festival 2014, at the MART 

Through focus on, and manipulation of the act of breathing this piece seeks to call attention to the experience of being in the performing body. Through fluctuations in rhythm, depth and length, I try to find the space between breathing as voluntarily controlled and involuntary act.


Image Credit: Fiona Kileen


Drawing down the diaphragm, ribs expand outward and upward.
Air rushes in, past the lips.
Hold,
a pause,
tightness in the voice box,
stuck in the throat.
Release.
Breath pushes up and brushes along the oesophagus. Feeling full, wide, tubular. Gushing out and around the nasal passages.
Chest slowly releases.
The final,
whisper,
forced,
out.

Central to this work is a struggle with questions such as: how can the gendered body show its experiences?; how can we move beyond prescribed identifications, and towards empathy with the flesh? how can we make strange the language of being in and representing the body?  

This piece continues my exploration of tensions between the experiential and the spectacular body - states of inhabiting the body, and being an image - as an on-going concern of my practice, which studies a shifting and twisting relationship to the self through the ever increasing prevalence of hyper-mediatisation.

This piece has existed as both a live performance and a piece to video.